Friday, October 25, 2013

An Acceptable Daily Intake (ADI) for nitrate of 3.7 mg/kg b.w./day, equivalent to 222 mg nitrate per day for a 60 kg adult was established by the former Scientific Committee on Food (SCF) and was reconfirmed by the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA) in 2002.

Additionally, to place these findings in context, exposures from other nitrate sources such as drinking water and cured meat, at an average of 35-44 mg/person per day, were also taken into account. As a conservative base case, a person eating 400 g of mixed vegetables at typical median nitrate concentration levels would on average receive a dietary exposure to nitrate of 157 mg/day.

A study by MGH researchers finds that some of the symptoms often seen in middle-aged men – changes in body composition, energy, strength and sexual function – are caused not only by decreases in testosterone production but also by reduced levels of estrogen.

Smashing Pumpkins frontman William Corgan was in attendance at the Ravinia Music Festival outside of Chicago last weekend according to Paste Magazine. During the festival Cheap Trick along with Indian American singer Gingger Shankar performed The legendary Beatles album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in it’s entirety. Halfway through the performance Cheap Trick guitarist Rick Nelsen grabbed a copy of Cheap Trick’s Live at Budokan and threw it into the crowd. The album was caught by none other then Corgan.

Saturday, August 3, 2013

A universal common ancestor is at least 10²⁸⁶⁰ times more probable than having multiple ancestors, Theobald calculates.

A model that had a single common ancestor and allowed for some gene swapping among species was even better than a simple tree of life. Such a scenario is 10³⁴⁸⁹ times more probable than the best multi-ancestor model, Theobald found. That's a 1 with 3,489 zeros after it.

Theobald's study does not address how many times life may have arisen on Earth. Life could have originated many times, but the study suggests that only one of those primordial events yielded the array of organisms living today.